WASHINGTON: Going Rogue: An American Life expected to appeal to Christian right - 1.5 million copies printed in first run of autobiography. It is outselling Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster and is already the butt of a torrent of jokes about blank pages before the reading public has seen a word.

But anyone who hoped they had seen the last of Sarah Palin after she quit as Alaska’s governor had better brace themselves as her autobiography shoots to the top of the bestseller lists weeks before it is released.

The former vice-presidential candidate has already done very nicely out of it with a reported $7m advance for Going Rogue: An American Life.

Whether readers will feel the 400-plus pages are worth it remains to be seen. Palin wrote the book in four months and finished it so far ahead of schedule that the release date was brought forward from next spring to 17 November.

Harper Collins is to print 1.5m copies but that looks likely to be just a first run, with pre-orders already putting Going Rogue at the top of the bestseller list on Amazon’s American website. It has pushed Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s latest novel from the top spot. But at least one reader, her former running mate, John McCain, will be waiting more with trepidation than excitement.

“The part I am looking forward to least is some of the disagreements that took place within the campaign,” he told NBC.

Further confirmation that Palin is not Barack Obama, who writes his own books, comes with the news that she used a ghostwriter who is arguably more controversial than Palin herself.

HarperCollins describes the autobiography as

“her words, her life, and it’s all there in full and fascinating detail”.

Palin has used a ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, who has previously collaborated on the memoirs of a retired general, William Boykin, who described his mission in the military as to defeat Satan in order to save America as a Christian country.

Among views Vincent helped Boykin to express was why, apparently, the whole world despises America: “We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” Then there was his view of fighting Somalis: “I knew that my God was bigger than his.” There are already questions about whether a book that is expected to have a strong appeal to the Christian right with a fiery diatribe against Obama’s socialist conspiracy will do anything to advance Palin’s thirst for a bigger political stage. Steve Schmid thinks that she has talents, but...she would not be a winning [presidential] candidate for the Republican Party in 2012.”